How do we prepare students for a life time immersed in a digital environment?

A four-year collaboration between Deloitte Centre for the Edge and Geelong Grammar School, looking into the need for digital skills in the workplace, has come to an end. Peter (C4tE) and Tim (GGS) talk about the findings in a 20m interview. The concluding report to the project—Digital agency and the skills gap—is on the Deloitte Australia web site.

The research highlights that while digital skills, knowing how to use digital tools, are important, knowing when and why to use them is more important. The problem many workers experience is not a lack of skill in how digital tools are intended to be used, but a lack of judgement of when it is appropriate to use digital tools. The solution, then, is not teaching graduates more digital skills, but to foster in them the predilections, attitudes and behaviours, that enable them to understand how to productively integrate these tools into their work and the workplace.

The good news is that this does not require us to ‘blow up’ the current education system—it’s a subtle change. We need to go into non-digital subjects in existing curricula and ‘reframe’ them, tweaking learning plans so that the students are situated in a digital workplace that presents them with an open problem to solve and access to a range of digital tools with which to solve the problem. It’s not a question of changing curricula, but one of changing how we enact them.

Digital agency and the skills gap

Sandra Spencer talks to Peter Williams, Chief Edge Officer at Deloitte Australia Centre for the Edge, on Tech Load from Southern FM, about his experience in disaster recovery, and his current work with the recent bush fires and COVID pandemic.

2020-05-06 Tech Load Interview with Peter Williams

Peter Williams and Bambi Damty sat down in the Deloitte offices on the 5th March 2020 to talk about Peter’s work in bushfire recovery, both the last bushfire season over the summer of 2019/2020 and Black Saturday bushfires around Saturday February 7th in 2009. Peter and Bambi discuss what we can learn from this experience, and how it is related to his work at the Centre for the Edge.

Publication was delay due to the global pandemic, though this event made the interview timelier than we anticipated.

Deloitte Australia Centre for the Edge

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